After Kid’s English Class is over, Janina approaches me and drops her voice to a whisper. Of course she only speaks Spanish, but she says, “Madeline, I need to tell you something important– the old owner of this house died yesterday.”

“I know,” I answer. “Sad, isn’t it? I heard already.” I hadn’t known him, but I still felt bad.

“Sure it’s sad, but I needed to tell you what happens now– I mean, you have to be safe, right?– and I didn’t think you knew– but you have to just–”

Catching only bits and pieces of her rapid speech, I slowed her down. “He died. That’s sad. What else?”

She takes a quick breath and again launches into her explanation. “He died. And he owned this house— that’s the point, see? Now since he died, and you live in his old house, you could also get sick. Very, very sick.”

I shake my head. “We’re fine, seriously, we’re not gonna get sick.”

“No, no, no!” she exclaims. “That’s how it works! When someone dies, the people who live in their house get sick. I don’t know– with malaria or dengue or something.”

Realizing this as a superstition, I answer, “But we’re fine, really, it’s okay!”

She firmly presses her lips together, then opens them with the serious message: “Madeline. You could die. Elijah could die, or anybody in your family could. Please, just listen to me, okay?”

I nod. Tears are starting to prick my eyes, seeing her dedication to this. But I know Janina, and there’s no explaining anything to her until she’s finished.

“Okay, okay, listen.” she repeats. “You have to go to the priest– I’ll help you find him. We’ll take him some water, oh, one or two gallons, and we’ll get him to bless it.”

“Bless? The water?”

“Yes, now listen: I can help you, but we use the water and get it all over the house– the walls and stuff– and that will keep you from getting sick.”

“Janina?” I say.

“Yes? You understand, right?”

“Look, I know you’re worried, okay?”

“I am worried!” She shrieks.

I offer her a weak smile. She furrows her eyebrows are nearly launches back into how I could die.

“It doesn’t say anywhere in Bible to do that water-stuff, so we’re safe.” I explain.

“Where in there does it say we don’t have to?” grabbing the Book out of my hands.

“Nowhere. It doesn’t say it at all, see?” I flip through the pages. “You know something? God’s taking care of me and my family. He protects us. Am I saying that right?” I ask.

“Yeah, He protects you.” She says, slightly correcting my pronunciation.

“So everything’s good.” I conclude.

“Madeline… does He protect you guys because you take care of us children?”

“He takes care of us because… well, we believe in Him, and love Him.” I tell her.

“Right, I knew all that.”

“And He loves us, Janina, all of us,” I remind her.

“Okay,” she nods.

“So don’t worry.” I add.

“I won’t.”

 

Janina. Worried about us. Trying to warn us and protect us. Trying to help us.

This little jungle girl doesn’t know the truth. I can only pray that when she sees that we’re not sick, that the owner’s death has not affected our health, that she will come that much closer to be willing to believe. As we share the Truth- So All May Know.

 

-Madeline Studebaker

 

 

Taking a team of Americans through the jungle into… uh, deeper jungle. Call me Miss Important. Helping my daddy and another missionary take this group into a faraway rainforest village. Of course, I hadn’t actually been there yet, like, in person, but I’d been told all about it, and besides– how different from all the other villages could this one be?

“It’s two hours on the bus, half an hour on the canoe,” I recited when asked about how long it would take to get there. I ended with a big smile and barely refrained from a curtsy. I was just that excited.

After answering the one hundredth question about Ecuador (okay, that might be a slight exaggeration), we stopped in the middle of nowhere.

We were ordered to pull our mud boots on and hop in the canoe. The mud boots, backpacks, and mosquitos weren’t the part that bothered me. It was the canoe. Because it wasn’t there.

And we waited for it. For-e-ver. I was starting to get worried there weren’t any around.

But finally, finally, half of the team got in one and headed down the river. I wasn’t in the first group. And the thought that the canoe actually might not come back wasn’t terribly reassuring.

Once we all got in the canoe (it did return for us), there was the normal, totally expected freak-out from just about everybody.

“We are actually riding in this thing?!”

“Where are the life jackets?!”

“Wait– I can’t swim!”

It was awhile down river when we heard: “AAAAHHHHH! HEY, YOU GUYS!!”

And then we saw them. The other half of the team. Stranded on the side of the river, screaming at us.

“Why are you… here?” Dad asked. “This isn’t our village!”

“We know, but this is where he dropped us off.” they said. “So we told him to go get you.”

We rode on, fervently praying that they wouldn’t become an anaconda snack.

Once we got to the village, we unloaded and started working.

“Rocks.” we were told by the pastor’s wife. “Lots and lots of rocks and sand. We mix it with the cement.”

I translated. “She wants us to go get some rocks.”

“Rocks?”

“Yeah. Oh, and sand.”

“From… where?”

She took us back to the river and an old canoe. After Mom hugged me good bye like she’d never see me again, Dad warned me not to drown. (Thanks, Dad.) We jumped in the rickety canoe and rode off with four Kichwas.

“Just to the other side of the river, right?” they asked me.

“Uh… that’s what she told me.” It wasn’t a very wide river, but it was deep. We got out there, and turned into another tributary. That… wasn’t expected. But I was determined to keep my cool. And I was certainly not going to announce my biggest fear: that we were getting kidnapped.

“We’re not getting kidnapped,” I told myself. I got a couple awkward stares. Oh. I must have said it out loud. Whoopsie. Then we stopped at a sand bar and were ordered off our vessel.

“Start filling the canoe.” they commanded, handing us shovels and buckets.

We filled up the eight or nine buckets, and started back to the boat. Where our guides were dumping the buckets into the bottom of the canoe.

“Oh.” somebody said. “They meant… actually fill the canoe.”

When the canoe was filled to their approval, we all hopped back in. Well, minus four of us. The canoe started sinking with all the weight and no, we could not take all the sand back out, according to the Ecuadorians. We promised to return for our friends once we got the rocks and sand back to the village.

I didn’t want to do any more physical labor after digging up sand bars. And I would not after carrying a 20-pound buckets full of wet sand and rocks about a mile. Twice. I sank down on a wooden bench in a tiny house with no walls except for the bedroom. The room was filled with about 10 children, screaming and jumping off of stacks of the teams supplies. Ah-ha! I thought. I’ll watch the team’s stuff. I’ll baby-sit. I’ll supervise. And I won’t fall asleep…

I woke up to Elijah tapping my forehead and yelling that Momma wanted me to watch him. (I later found out the he and his new buddies had been all the way to the river and back.)

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” I moaned. “I can’t believe this!” There was drool on the bench. I wiped it off my face. “This never happened,” I told Elijah and the other kids. “Are you hearing me?” I snapped. I looked up as a few of the team members walked in. I just knew I had a sign hanging around my neck that said, Caution: Irresponsible Missionary Kid.

How much worse could it get?

“I’m hungry,” I heard myself complain.

Oh, it could get worse.

Me, Miss Missionary.

It’s not a question. She’s standing in the doorway with her notebook and stub of a pencil. Dad’s sick in bed with a cold, and Mom’s teaching his English class. I am going to have to do this.

“I came because I need help with my English homework.” she says.

“Come in. Um, sit down here,” I say, pushing my own schoolwork away, clearing some space on the dining room table.

“Welcome.” I say awkwardly. My Spanish grammar and pronunciation is horrible. Even I can know how awful I sound. But I’m going to have to make it work.

“So, you’re Christian’s sister,” I say.

She nods. Christian has been here for English help before. Except that was when Dad was doing the helping. I’m on my own this time.

“I’m Diana.” she says.

I take a deep breath. “Okay, Diana. So, let me see your homework problems.”

“This is the first part. I just don’t get it,” she sighs.

It’s: List three things you can do.

“So… what can you do?” I ask, when we’re done translating the question.

“I can swim.” she says without hesitation. Although it looks like she thinks it’s a pretty dumb question to start with.

“I… can… swim,” I read aloud. “See? Yo puedo nadar.”

Diana copies what I’ve written. After making sure it’s a C, not an O, and a M, not a N. (After I’m finished apologizing for my lack of handwriting skills.)

We finish that and move on to translating digits into English written numbers.

“Why?” she asks. “Why do you write o’clock? What does it mean?”

“I… it, uh, it doesn’t mean anything. Neither does the line between the 20 and the 5 in twenty-five. It’s just there.” I answer. Hey, that’s my take on it.

Diana isn’t too impressed.

We look at the words we drop in English that we need in Spanish. I learn a thing or two.

“I’ll come back if I need more help,” she says as she packs up.

“That’s fine. Sounds good. I have English class for girls on Tuesdays, if you want to come,” I offer.

“Thanks.”

I’m pretty sure I’m not a good teacher. But I don’t think Diana minded.

 

-Madeline Studebaker

 

Girls Bible Study.

Me in charge.

Not really a leader. And really not a Spanish-speaker.

But here I am, trucking on with my horrible language techniques and impeded social skills.

“And this is the best tea, I think, so–” my eyes search the table. “Uh, where is the sugar?”

Laugh erupts from all five girls.

“Where is the sugar?” I ask slowly. Maybe they aren’t understand me, you know, with my accent and all.

Or maybe they aren’t understanding how seriously important this brown-sugar-in-the-mint-tea thing is, either.

“Nagy had it.” Janina squeaks.

I notice the past tense on the word “have”. That worries me.

“Nagy?” I question.

She gravely hands me the sugar bowl. It is completely empty.

I shriek, grabbing her tea cup, expecting there to be a slush of brown sugar in the bottom. But there’s just tea.

“It, uh–” Nagy clears her throat. “It wasn’t for the snack?”

I can’t control myself. I burst out laughing. After about a five-minute episode, the girls finally get me to stop hyperventilating.

“There are going to be cookies in a minute.” I explain. “But I can’t believe you ate all that. How could you do that?”

She smiles shyly. “I guess I did it with a spoon.”

I stir my tea. “Okay. That works,”

 

-Madeline Studebaker

The beach is an awesome place. I was so glad our friends had invited us to go with them to the coast for a few days.

As soon as I possibly could, I changed into my bathing suit and charged straight into the ocean. I wasn’t the best swimmer, but I was determined to become the best boogie boarder out of everyone on the beach. And I knew it was going to take some serious work.

I had never been surfing (you probably could’ve figured that out), or even boogie boarding in the ocean. I almost got myself drowned the first couple of times that I tried to ride a wave on the boogie board, and then I made the discovery of going with the grain. I was making it my goal to not die when my dad and little sister joined me.

I was just getting the hang of it when Dad screamed something about a giant wave approaching. There it was, towering over me. It was scary, but I knew I had to keep swimming to where it would break. If I didn’t, it would hit me tsunami-style and I’d be a mile out from the shore, floating like flotsam for the rest of my life. (I wanted to be famous, but not if it meant I was the next “Castaway”.)

I turned around, jumped up, landed on the board, and shot off in my impression of a professional. I figured that’s about how it looked anyway. Thinking back on it now, in a more realistic way, I probably looked like an overweight walrus trying to get away from a polar bear. Oh well. Even I know you can’t win them all.

Still, I expected cheers from Abigail. She’s the most supportive person I know. She would probably cheer if I fell off the board and didn’t come up for an entire minute. She’s just that optimistic. I couldn’t hear anything other than the wave crashing down and my heart beating, but, I figured that it wasn’t a bad thing.

“This must be how it feels to be a dolphin or something,” I mused. “With your adrenaline pumping every time you start swimming,”

After a few seconds of that, I started thinking about how awfully cold I felt. “Well, it’s the ocean. It’s going to be windy sometimes.” I told myself. I knew it could just be the ocean breeze, but something was definitely fishy. I stifled a girlish scream as I realized my shorts had abandoned me and I was flying through the Pacific commando. I was stripped of my dignity, and quite ironically, the bottom half of my bathing suit. Obviously, Mother Nature had decided my buns were looking a little whiter than she would have preferred.

“This cannot be happening! They’re never going to let me forget this!” I shouted with self-pity. Salt water filled my mouth. I swallowed, because I knew it wouldn’t hurt. As soon as I got up on the sand, I’d puke my guts out anyway. From total embarrassment.

How on earth were we going to explain this to my mother? I would have rather seen a shark right there and then. And had a heart attack or something. I kept getting closer and closer to the shore. The beach was going to be humiliating. I changed my thought to: I would rather be right there in the water with a power cord wrapped around my body and all ten of my fingers in electrical sockets, and be staring a tiger shark in his beady eyes. Nothing happened that changed my course. So much for important (sometimes weird) wishes coming true. I was still moving forward.

I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes, and got an early start on erasing the memory. This was the worst thing that could possibly happen to me, Ms. Missionary. Blinding the Beaches of Canoa.

I was mortified. I might be hanging ten, but my backside was hanging out.

Everything I say is automatically the most hilarious thing to ever be spoken.

English, Spanish, it doesn’t matter.

In fact, some of the kids think they need to repeat me to remind me exactly how funny I am.

Copy cats.

“Run, don’t stop!” I yell from my position in the field. “The bases are loaded!”

“Fun, boat mop! De faces her bloated!” he screams, jumping up and down on 3^rd base.

I roll my eyes. “You’re out!”

“More bout!”

I put my hands on my hips. “You’re testing me,”

“More pesky knee,” he giggles.

Ah yes, the humorous English language.

 

-Madeline Studebaker

 

 

Alejo, Javier, and Aaron stick there heads up in the window. I hadn’t seen them, but I’m not startled. After all, how scary can 6-year-olds be?

They’re some of the kids who come Wednesdays through Fridays to the kids’ programs. Today’s Saturday. My day off. Sometimes.

“Hi. How’s everything?” I ask in Spanish.

“Fine.” Alejo answers. “And that’s pretty,” he comments on the song I’m playing.

“Yeah.” It’s not often I get the little keyboard out. I love music, and this thing got its handles hacked off with a saw so it could fit in my suitcase. I’m out of practice, and I don’t think it’s pretty at all. But I smile anyway.

“What do you want?” I ask. I like the way we talk here. You can say what you want to say. You ask questions bluntly with other kids. It’s not like it’s rude or anything. It’s the way I was spoken to when we started all of this, and now it’s the way I talk too.

“I want an orange.” He says. “Can I have one, miss?”

I try to keep myself from laughing. I’m not exactly one of the people I think should be called miss. I pretend to think for a while. “You can have one.” I say. “One.”

“Okay.” They disappear into the back yard where the fruit trees are. About 5 minutes later, they’re back.

I’m handed an orange through the window. “Peel this, can’t you?” Alejo says.

I go get a knife from the kitchen. I grab the orange out of his hands. The knife goes around and around the orange, cutting the peel off into a shape like a long curly snake. I cut the top off of one side and hand it back. “Here.”

“Thanks. We’re gonna go play marbles now.”

“Okay.” I sit back down and realize how different everything is here.

How much I’ve changed. The way I talk, the way I handle things, the way I live.

It’s not strange to me anymore. Because being here, every day, is just another normal day of my life.

Because I’m here, peeling oranges.

Rule Number One of Being in Misahualli During Carnival:

Don’t you even think about getting into Dona Gloria’s without getting soaked or sprayed or painted. Or all of the above.

 

“We are going to Dona Gloria’s. And we are going to get our soup.” Dad announced. I’m pretty sure and nothing is going to stop me was written all over his face in love-the-food language.

“Eric, honey,” Mom started. (She always uses honey when she knows he’s not going to want to hear something.) “You know it’s Carnival, right? So there are probably a lot of celebrations going on in town. The restaurants will be packed, and we’ll have to wait for a really long time.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Dad said. (See what I mean?) “We always eat there on Sundays, and we always get our bola de verde soup.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

We stepped outside and looked at the soccer field. It was now parking lot central. About a bazillion cars, trucks, and tour buses now covered the grass.

“Yay, soup!” Abigail cheered.

Oh, boy. I think to myself. I might need my war paint for this… woah.

We hustled through the street to town. Almost a mile through nothing but tourists, silly string, and red and gold dye.

“Where are we?” Elijah whispers to me.

“This is the way to town,” I said. To explain the whole we-don’t-recognize-our-own-street thing, I added, “It’s Carnival.”

He just said “Oh.”

We finally, finally got to the restaurant. It took us about an hour, which was because we’d been wading through all those people, but we were, at last, eating our lunch.

Never mind that it was already 2:00 pm. Nothing bad had happened.

No buckets of water dumped on our heads, no shaving cream squirted in our faces, and no red power thrown all over us. I was feeling pretty good about it all.

But then we left the restaurant.

Zzzquuiisssstt! And I can’t hear anything. I panic. What just happened? But then I wipe my face with the back of my arm. The entire left side is covered with fluffy white stuff. “Oh.”

Abigail starts laughing. “It isn’t funny.” I say.

Then, a few steps farther, out of the crowd comes another zzzquuiisssstt! And both Abigail’s and Mom’s faces are completely frosted with white foam. “Ha, ha!” I triumph. “So I guess it’s every man for himse–” and then comes the sound of something shooting out of an aerosol can. I look up, and then it hits me. Literally.

I’m choking. I’m blind. All that’s running through my head is this tastes like soap; what is it? And, whoever did that is in for it. My mouth was open.

“Gracias!” yells Mom.

“Wow, look at you!” Elijah shrieks.

“That’s…”

“Well, what are you waiting for?” I sputter. “Get him back!”

“With what?” Dad asks.

I yank a bunch of quarters out of my pocket. “How much for a can of silly string?”

And a bucketful of water comes splashing down on me.

A palm covered in red dye smacks my wrist.

Ah, yes. Carnival.